Mealy-mouthed may be the worst adjective one can apply to a critic, but I think the only fair answer to this question is “both.” Criticism is of no use if the critic’s mind isn’t, at the last and however mixedly, made up. And while open-mindedness is a fine thing at the start, it should not mean that the critic comes to a book, new or old, without a set of tastes and values. In fact, a reader’s awareness, accumulated over time, of that particular critic’s underlying standards will help to illuminate why he felt able to conclude that something is good or bad.

Even so, such a set of premises and inclinations shouldn’t prohibit a critic’s being pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed by a book — or the acknowledgment of his upending to the reader. As Matthew Arnold long ago explained, criticism shows “disinterestedness,” an admirable thing, “by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches.” Those underlying standards — flexible and evolving ones — are the springboard for the free play. (The certainty of mine that has faded the most over time is the Arnoldian belief that good books can make a better world. I’ll settle for ones that make a better library.)

In an essay for Harper’s Magazine in 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick worried that books were being “born into a puddle of treacle” instead of the once-colder shower of scrutiny she could recall. The bedside manner that she deplored has become only more marked in the intervening decades, as the reviewing of fiction and poetry has fallen less to professional critics and more to fellow novelists and poets — colleagues who don’t wish to run into those they’ve disapproved of while riding the same circuit of readings and writers’ conferences. Today’s literary reviews too often turn into participation trophies, quiet tour-guide appreciations. Few things, of course, are duller than self-indulgent put-downs; but informed and spirited dismissals are another matter, and they remain in too-short supply.

So do informed and spirited approvals. The phrase “everyone’s a critic,” once the complaining sigh of the creator, is today closer to being a literal truth. Criticism was always (and certainly in Arnold’s time) vulnerable to careerism and hackery, but amid the pingings of Twitter and along the web pages of Goodreads and LibraryThing and Amazon, the fast one-star slash and the instant five-star burble are now given the same algorithmic weight as the lengthy and well-considered three- or four-star comment. There are, one should note, many of the latter, but they always seem about to drown in the shrill orthographical chaos surrounding them, complaints often written by those who look forward to the demise of critics — and editors — with a populist glee.

Far removed from all this, and from most reality, we have academic literary criticism, now reducing literature to fodder for pseudoscientific cultural studies, taking its first duty to be the discovery of ways in which books can cause crushing personal offense. Students are fed literary theory before they’ve read an appreciable number of literary texts to which those theories might be applied. It’s all telescopes and no stars. Looking back on his own long critical career, in a lecture called “To Criticize the Critic” (1961), T.S. Eliot took note of the theoretical concepts he had developed (“dissociation of sensibility,” “objective correlative”), but declared that “my own theorizing has been epiphenomenal of my tastes, and . . . in so far as it is valid, it springs from direct experience of those authors who have profoundly influenced my own writing.” Theories, like standards, should arise inductively; the critic has to remind himself that he exists because of the author and in service to the reader. The simplest prescription for better criticism of all kinds — electronic, journalistic, academic — remains: read more; think longer; write less.

Thomas Mallon’s nine novels include “Finale,” “Henry and Clara,” “Fellow Travelers” and “Watergate,” a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also published nonfiction about plagiarism (“Stolen Words”), diaries (“A Book of One’s Own”), letters (“Yours Ever”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Mrs. Paine’s Garage”), as well as two books of essays. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. A recipient of the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style, he is Professor Emeritus of English at The George Washington University.

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Liesl SchillingerCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

By Liesl Schillinger

If you’re a writer known for dispensing venom, your targets grow immune to your poison.

“I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent.” That’s what William Ashenden, the man-of-letters-about-town who narrates “Cakes and Ale” — W. Somerset Maugham’s blithely brutal roman à clef about the London literary scene — has to say about his friend (or frenemy) the writer Alroy Kear. When the novel came out, in 1930, Maugham’s readers saw Kear as a sendup of their prolific countryman Hugh Walpole. As a BBC reporter wrote a few years ago, Walpole’s “literary reputation was dealt a killer blow when he was savaged by Somerset Maugham.”

Some critics may thrill at the idea of smiting authors with the coup de grâce this way, but the prospect dismays and, to an extent, bores me. Dismays, because I have deep respect for an author’s effort and am mindful of the effect that public sanction has on a writer’s career. Bores, because I find a tiresome vanity in sustained, recurrent critical dudgeon. Some books deserve unsparing reviews; and I’ve written them myself when I found a book to be irredeemably bad or evil (clearly this is subjective) in its conception, execution or intent. But I’m wary of the punitive impulse, so I check my motives when I’m tempted to bring out the scourge.

If I decide a book’s appeal is a question of taste, not art (for instance, Faulkner isn’t to blame if “As I Lay Dying” leaves me cold), I ask myself what the book achieves that might fascinate readers other than myself, and explore the author’s distinctive ideas, imagery and voice. It isn’t easy; it’s harder, in my opinion, to write an evenhanded review than a negative one — that is, one that holds the reader’s attention. In his 1875 novel “The Way We Live Now,” one of my favorite authors, Anthony Trollope (several generations older than Maugham and infinitely more indulgent of his fellow man), pointed out the hazard of a charitable critical approach: “Eulogy is invariably dull.” There’s a distinct line between eulogy and fairness, but every critic knows you make more of a splash when you wield a bludgeon than when you bestow a bouquet.

Yet Trollope also recognized that brickbats too readily brandished lose their power to stun. If you’re a writer known for dispensing venom, he explained, your targets grow immune to your poison: “Censure from those who are always finding fault is regarded so much as a matter of course that it ceases to be objectionable,” making the dependably whip-cracking critic a “caricaturist.” Whereas an open-minded critic makes an enemy every time he or she lays down a harsh verdict: “Abuse from those who occasionally praise is considered to be personally offensive.”

I read both the novels mentioned here in 1995, the year I started reviewing, when the responsibilities and consequences of criticism were much on my mind. A pan is the fledgling critic’s calling card; and the second review I published remains the most negative I’ve ever written. When the boyfriend of the author who provoked my scorn left a message defending her on my answering machine, I didn’t regret my words — the book was truly vile. Still, I felt bad for her, and that phone message served to remind me, early in my critical path, of the person behind the pen. It strengthened my resolve to never censure without compelling reason — even if it meant that each of my nay votes would earn me a foe.

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer,” Ashenden says to his colleague Kear, mocking him for showing excessive delicacy in his treatment of another novelist Ashenden despises. Kear protests: “You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical.” It would be easier, he claims, “to be allusive and charming and rather subtle, you know the sort of thing, and tender.”

Tenderness was not Ashenden’s critical goal, or Maugham’s; nor is it mine. But delicacy is not easier than condemnation; and as a fallback, I prefer it.

Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based critic, translator, and moderator. She studied comparative literature at Yale, worked at The New Yorker for more than a decade and became a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review in 2004. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Vogue, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She is the author of “Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century,” and her translations include the novels “Every Day, Every Hour,” by Natasa Dragnic, and “The Lady of the Camellias,” by Alexandre Dumas, fils.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Should Critics Aim to Be Open-Minded or to Pass Judgment?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe